The Seminole In The Everglades

By the time General Zachary Taylor took over command of the Army in Florida, the Army and Navy Chronicle on November of 1838 published his observations “that there reports that there are upwards of 200 Indian and Indian negroes consisting of Seminoles, Tallahassees, and a few Mickasukies left in the territory.” The remaining Florida Indians moved deeper into the Everglades. The few remaining Seminole in the Everglades were led by Billy Bowlegs, who under heavy political pressuring from both the Oklahoma Seminole and the federal government agreed to move westward with most of his followers in 1858. The successor to Bowlegs in Florida, Surnucka Micco, who became leader of the remaining Seminole in the Everglades, and he “declared the Seminoles
In the 1840s, there were still a few references to Mikasuki and Tallahassee tribal identities in various sources, but by 1850 most non-Seminole references had chiefly dissipated in Florida. In 1896, it was estimated that the Seminole remaining in the Everglades were divided into 4 bands: Miami Indians, the Big Cypress [today’s Mikasuki], the Talla-hassees and the Okeechobees.” In 1946, anthropologist John Reed Swanton’s comprehensive work Indians of the southeastern United States from the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology was published. The book recognized that in Florida “two main bands, one Muskogee (Cow Creek Indians), the other Mikasuki (Big Cypress Indians). There were some smaller elements, but they have now lost their identity in the general
After settling most legal problems with the Creek in the Treaty of August 7, 1856, they later faced challenges to their land after the Civil War for taking sides with the Confederacy. The Seminole Nation in Oklahoma, like in Florida also faced dissolution of their government from the earlier Curtis Act of 1898, a move to make the Indian Territory into Oklahoma statehood. The Oklahoma Seminole also used the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 to reestablish their Constitution and government. The Oklahoma Seminole Nation ratified a constitution on March 8, 1969, and today consists of 14 town bands, including the Mekusukey and the